A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a new and improved automatic shade cutter and more particularly to an automatic shade cutter designed for use in retail establishments for operation by a customer without the need for a clerk or other store personnel. The customer first selects a stock shade and inserts the shade into a measured cutting position in the machine for cut-off to a particular width in accordance with the customer's requirement. The present application is an improvement on the automatic shade cutter shown and described in the copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 582,463, filed Feb. 22, 1984 and assigned to the same assignee as the present application. The automatic shade cutter provides a safe, reliable and automatic system for accurately cutting shades to width and eliminates the need for a retail clerk or other personnel to be available for cutting a shade to a customer's required width.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Over the years, a wide variety of solutions have been proposed and tested in order to deal with the problem of sizing a window shade to a particular width. A "Star" shade cutter, manufactured and sold by Star Shade Cutter Company of St. Joseph, Mich., is commonly found in many retail establishments that sell window shades. The "Star" cutter is a lathe-like apparatus and a certain degree of skill is required. "Star" shade cutters are generally not suitable for use by retail customers alone without aid from store personnel because of exposed rotating parts and cutting mechanisms.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,214,575; 1,964,984; 2,326,463; 2,326,293; 2,481,446; 2,521,004; 2,888,048; 3,064,452; 3,100,649; 3,107,564; 3,129,621; 3,159,071; 3,494,230; 3,679,109 3,715,940; 3,760,664; and 3,771,393; 3,933,347; and 4,172,399 relate to various types of window shade cutters and devices for trimming elongated articles to selected widths. In addition, Canadian Pat. No. 731,442; German Pat. No. 402079 and Australian Pat. No. 100560 relate to cutting mechanisms for trimming various types of material to width.
The problem of sizing window shades to a particular width has also been addressed by providing shades having prescored lines in the shade fabric to facilitate manual tearing or peeling away an edge portion to leave the remaining portion at a desired width. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,006,770; 4,102,383; 4,102,384; 4,102,385 relate to this type of product.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,157,108 discloses a shade roller with a plurality of severable ring elements which may be removed as desired to provide a shade roll of desired width and U.S. Pat. No. 4,139,043 discloses a window shade hem slat which can be broken off along lines of weakness to a desired width in order to fit a particular width of shade.
In more recent years, shade rollers have been formed of convolute, paper stock tubes rather than wood dowels and a wide variety of removable end plugs or terminals have been developed, for example, such as those shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,362,461 and 3,340,922.